t8y2/motty

Motty is a Go desktop app that puts SSH terminals, SFTP file browsing, port forwarding, VNC/RDP remote desktops and an AI assistant into a single window. It is aimed at people who spend their day in remote shells and want files, tunnels and remote desktops beside the terminal instead of in separate apps. It is built on the Viva UI framework, so the README describes no Electron runtime, embedded browser or JavaScript layer Motty repository.

What it does

A typical session starts from a host list: connect over SSH, open the terminal tab, browse or transfer files in the attached SFTP panel, add forwarding rules, and optionally open a VNC or RDP desktop. Hosts can be grouped and imported from OpenSSH config, PuTTY, Xshell, MobaXterm, WindTerm or Electerm. The terminal offers tabs, splits, searchable scrollback, true colour and image escape sequences, and a command palette covers most actions so the mouse is optional Motty repository.

Mechanisms that change the workflow

The assistant has two modes. Ask uses the visible terminal as context for answers; Agent can also run commands, with risk classification and an approval gate, and the command is shown with a margin mark. Terminal text is redacted before reaching a model, and provider keys stay in the vault, but the README explicitly calls the approval gate a safety control rather than a sandbox and advises against pointing an agent at hosts where a wrong command is unacceptable Motty repository.

An optional MCP server exposes the same tools to external agents. It is off by default, loopback-only and bearer-token protected; motty mcp-serve offers a stdio path without a window or token. Forwarding rules are loopback-only and stop with the SSH tab that owns them, and RDP/VNC can be reached through an SSH host, with the protocol limits described in a dedicated document remote-desktop note.

Requirements and limits

Prebuilt packages exist for macOS (arm64/amd64), Windows (amd64/arm64) and Linux (amd64/arm64) via the releases page; Linux packages are unsigned, and Homebrew, AUR and AppImage are not yet available releases. Building from source needs Go 1.26 or newer, a checkout of Viva beside the repository (Viva has its own licence and is not vendored), and macOS with Metal and Xcode tools, Windows 10/11, or Linux with X11 Motty repository.

Development builds share hosts, settings, AI configuration and vault with the release build, so a dev build can upgrade schemas an older release cannot read; the README recommends backing up and using an explicit data directory for migration or secret-reset work, while noting that this does not isolate system Keychain entries.

Motty is Apache-2.0 licensed, but the name and logo are not covered by that licence license.